Thursday, October 29, 2015

At last night's GOP presidential debate, the unquestionably brilliant Sen. Ted Cruz was asked if his refusal to "compromise" about yet again raising the debt limit shows "that you're not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?" (Please note that when the progressive media says politicians should "compromise," they mean that conservatives should kowtow to progressive policies--progressives are never expected to agree to conservative policies.) Here's how Cruz's response was received by public opinion guru Frank Luntz's focus group: "I've never tested in any primary debate a line that scored as well as this."

TRANSCRIPT:

CRUZ: You know, let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media.

(APPLAUSE) This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions -- "Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?" "Ben Carson, can you do math?" "John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?" "Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?" "Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?"

How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?

(APPLAUSE)

QUINTANILLA: (inaudible) do we get credit (inaudible)?

CRUZ: And Carl -- Carl, I'm not finished yet.

CRUZ: The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was, "Which of you is more handsome and why?"

(LAUGHTER)

And let me be clear.

(CROSSTALK)

QUINTANILLA: So, this is a question about (inaudible), which you have 30 seconds left to answer, should you choose to do so.

CRUZ: Let me be clear. The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

(LAUGHTER)

And nobody watching at home believed that any of the moderators had any intention of voting in a Republican primary. The questions that are being asked shouldn't be trying to get people to tear into each other. It should be what are your substantive positions...

As if to prove Cruz's point, Salon called his attack "paranoid," and The Washington Post, apparently watching a debate in some alternate universe, said that the palpably biased, and even more palpably nasty, CNBC moderators "out-maneuvered the contrary parliamentarian." So much for Salon and The Washington Post.

I've seen pretty much every presidential debate since 1980, and Cruz's response was the single most effective moment of any since that 1980 debate (because of that debate, Reagan, running even in the polls with Carter when the debate started, won the election a few days later in a landslide). I've seen Cruz do this before to great effect, and I've also seen him ad lib lengthy filibusters with more coherence than any of the other candidates could muster if their speech writers had written it out. He's not only flat-out brilliant but can't be flustered--he's argued numerous cases before the US Supreme Court, which is about as intense as it gets.

The progressive media mocks, belittles, and reduces to caricature middle America and anyone who doesn't buy into the the Northeast Corridor group-think. (I wonder, did anyone in the news media ever ask the president to explain his comment about Pennsylvanians--"they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment . . . .") They are so right about everything, they don't even deign to explain why (ever read Media Matters?).

Last night, Cruz had the temerity to talk back to his moral superiors, the all-knowing, enlightened progressive media, and in the process, he took back the moral high ground.

Cruz's slap-down resonates here. He tapped into a frustration we constantly experience writing this blog. When we talk about the need for fair processes for the presumptively innocent--processes no more "extreme" than those called for by numerous prominent law professors--the progressive blogosphere brands us misogynists, "rape apologists," and "victim blamers." A far left civil rights group put us on its hate list (I suspect it was encouraged to do so by a certain prominent feminist blogger). A feminist professor compared my blog to a white supremacist blog.

My politics are certainly to the left of Ted Cruz. But the smug, superior, chattering classes have made it personal for me, and based on my often quite nasty experience writing this blog, I say, "Go, Ted Cruz!"

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The Huffington Post quotes Savannah Badalich, founder of the Bruin Consent Coalition at UCLA, on why black women "don't feel comfortable" reporting rape to police: "I was once told by a survivor of color, 'if you don't think the death of Michael Brown or Eric Garner or activism happening in Ferguson has everything to do with why I didn't report my rape to the police, you have no idea about my experience or how to advocate for me.'"

In modern times, black and Hispanic men are still subjected to vile stereotypes that make getting justice very difficult (see here and here). But beyond that, social justice warriors have tapped into America's long tradition of rape hysteria and use the memes of the hangman to wage war on masculinity itself. Nowadays, the social justice warriors don't much care about the color of their target--only that he has a penis.

When it comes to the way law enforcement and the modern academy handle rape, the Ferguson police do not exemplify the villains. For that, we need to look instead to people like Duke lacrosse prosecutor Mike Nifong and Duke President Richard Brodhead and University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

"We would rather see an innocent bystander injured, maimed, or killed in a high-speed police chase than see someone get away after a lawful police stop."

I would be shocked if any self-respecting newspaper editorial board would write anything so unbalanced and so cavalierly dismissive of the innocent. That's because respect for innocent life is deeply-ingrained in the American psyche.

Except when it comes to one class of innocents.

Deep in the bowels of a mish-mash of an editorial about "Yes Means Yes" in The Daily Free Press, the student newspaper of Boston University, the following appears: "We would rather see someone falsely accused than see someone avoid coming forward for fear of retribution for wrongly accusing someone."

At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, students are upset about the protections for the presumptively innocent provided by the proposed Safe Campus Act. According to the student newspaper, Senior Laura Uribe, co-president of Miami’s Women Against Violence and Sexual Assault (WAVES), "feels that supporters of the bill are protecting the wrong people by allowing the police to investigate the claim first." Junior Carly Coats, a former volunteer with the organization Women Helping Women, said: ". . . I understand why they support this legislation, but I think they’re trying to save the wrong people.” Further, according to the student newspaper: "Senior Magda Orlander agrees and said she feels the bill protects the wrong people."

The presumptively innocent are "the wrong people."

When it comes to the issue of sexual assault, college students have been swept up in a mass-teria of PC groupthink, and they happily march in lockstep with the fanatics who drive the sexual grievance industry and who dominate the public discourse about sexual assault. Being concerned about sexual assault is a noble impulse, but treating one class of innocent citizens as acceptable collateral damage based on gender is hate, pure and simple, and it tosses onto a scrapheap of indifference concepts that are foundational to our liberty.

We are in a brave new world that regards innocent young men wrongly accused of sexual assault as flotsam. Way back in 2001, Catherine Comins, then-assistant dean of student life at Vassar, spoke to Time Magazine about rape: "Comins argues that men who are unjustly accused can sometimes gain from the experience. 'They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions.'"

Time Magazine recognized the injustice in Comins' comment, noting that "there is an ugly element of vengeance at work here."

Sadly, that "ugly element of vengeance" has become the prevailing culture on American college campuses and the motivating impulse the people who dominate the public discourse on sexual assault in America. And college students are happily going along.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Elura Nanos, who opposes the Safe Campus Act, has penned a jaw-dropping piece that might just be the Magna Carta of college rape idiocy. I won't dignify it by dissecting it word-by-word, but here's one of Nanos's brilliant insights: young men can protect themselves from false rape claims by . . . wait for it . . . speaking out against predatory behavior.

No, I'm not making that up.

Nanos seems blithely unaware that her inane suggestion is a classic non sequitur, that forcing innocent students to alter their behavior to avoid being victimized is called "victim blaming" when the genders are reversed, and that her epiphany has precisely zero chance of being effective.

We live in a world where almost half of all college women think that when a woman gives a guy a "nod in agreement," that isn't enough for consent. Forcing innocent men to speak out against predatory behavior isn't going to keep them safe from women who don't know rape from consensual sex, much less the liars.

Daniel Swinton, senior associate executive director at a thing called the Association of Title IX Administrators, defends the Department of Education's insistence that the standard of proof to decide sexual assault cases be lowered to preponderance of the evidence--the lowest possible standard under the law, and lower than the standard schools are required to provide for other offenses.

But wait. The Frisky didn't just laud the nude photos. It did the very thing it likens to rape when it happens to women--it actually posted the naked photos of Mr. Bieber, and it urged its readers to "take a look" and "zoom in, if you can."

As if that wasn't bad enough, The Frisky could not stop raving about Mr. Bieber's body part: "That’s a nice fucking wang, guys," it declared. "Like, this is a pretty solid penis. I’d even call it a beautiful penis. It’s a penis for the ages." Then it resorted to a grotesque analogy to describe it: "From where we sit, it appears to have the girth and the heft of a half-eaten tube of cookie dough. Just … yeah. Take a look."

Isn't that lovely?

If the genders were reversed, the writer would be fired on the spot and The Frisky would be tripping over itself to apologize to women as a class. But somehow, everything is always different when men and boys are the victims, and The Frisky won't be apologizing to anyone.

Good luck trying to explain this double-standard to your children. You could concoct some bullshit about how historical "male privilege" justifies it, but even a child would see through that. The next time some clever Internet outlet posts nude photos of female celebrities without their consent, it can justify it by pointing out that The Frisky proudly posted photos of Justin Bieber's "wang." Good work, Frisky, for setting back your own cause.

If you want to understand why so few people, including so few women, identify as feminist, and why a hell of a lot of people think that feminism is designed only to elevate one gender at the expense of another--logic, justice, and morality be damned--look no further than to countless double standards like this.

One final footnote. The feminist community has a strange relationship with Mr. Bieber. They may praise his penis for its resemblance to a lovely half-eaten tube of cookie dough, but he recently came under fire from feminists for writing song lyrics where a guy asks a girl to clarify whether she consents to sex.

Poor Justin Bieber--he even gets in trouble for suggesting that men should do what feminists insist men routinely fail to do--ask first--because he had the audacity to suggest that women sometimes send mixed signals. (Of course Justin Bieber's concern about mixed signals has been proven to be an understatement. It was recently shown by a survey feminists have hailed that almost half of all college women think a nod in agreement is not consent.)

Apparently, the only time feminists are happy with this poor mega-superstar is when they can violate him and longingly zoom in on his "beautiful wang."

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Haakon Gisvold, who is 18 and gay, claimed that on August 29th, while he was attending a party at the Lambda Chi Alpha house at UND in Grand Forks, someone shouted anti-gay slurs, a member of the fraternity pushed him to the ground, a fight ensued, then four other men removed his clothes and choked him. Someone called police and the crowd scattered. Gisvold said he hid behind a bush in his underwear until a Good Samaritan gave him clothes. A news report shortly after the alleged incident stated: "Family members of the victim tell Valley New Live people at the frat party didn't like how he was dressed, harassed him for being gay, stripped his clothes of, and beat him up."

School President Robert Kelley sent a letter to University of North Dakota students in early September saying that although the school didn't know all of the details, he was concerned by the report. He said the incident was even more disconcerting given that it followed the city's recent gay pride celebration. "I want to be very clear: Violent behavior of this nature is not tolerated at UND," Kelley said. "Any student or student organization found to have violated the UND Code of Student Life will be subject to disciplinary action."

The fraternity was stigmatized. Some Lambda Chi members felt apprehensive about wearing the fraternity’s letters around town. There was an assumption that something happened.

Except police now say it didn't happen:

Grand Forks and UND police officers identified more than 150 people who may have been at or near the fraternity at the time of the alleged incident. Detectives conducted interviews that led police to determine Gisvold had not been assaulted, according to the release.

A police report obtained by the Herald summarizes detectives’ findings and says multiple witnesses, including sober members of the fraternity and one of Gisvold’s friends, told police no assault had occurred as Gisvold described it.

"He was not held down by four people, he wasn't robbed, his property wasn't taken, he wasn't beaten with a belt, and he was (not) assaulted,” reads the police report.

Instead, police say Gisvold instigated a fight.

Witnesses told police Gisvold and another person, whose name was redacted from the report, got into a verbal argument over why Gisvold had just been kicked out of the fraternity, according to the police summary. The argument led to “shoving,” and witnesses alleged Gisvold ultimately grabbed the unidentified person by the hair and punched him in the head, according to the police summary.

Gisvold initially admitted to the Herald he fought a person outside the fraternity after that person pushed him.

But witnesses told police Gisvold was not subsequently held down and stripped of his clothes, but rather that he took off his own clothes and threw them “either in anger or out of frustration,” according to the police summary.

And again, another "privileged" fraternity is wrongly accused of harming a member of a marginalized class, the fraternity was stigmatized, and the University rushed to judgment by issuing a statement condemning "violent behavior of this nature."

The Lessons

When an allegation is lodged against someone perceived to be more privileged than the accuser, the accuser is automatically perceived to be a victim, and the accusation becomes its own conviction (the lone exception: when a beloved athlete is accused). Those of us who urge caution and insist that the facts be analyzed carefully and fairly in these situations are condemned. A few months ago, when Professor KC Johnson was speaking at a university about due process in sexual assault cases, an English professor--someone you'd think should know better--asked Prof. Johnson why he defends "the most privileged people" instead of the oppressed. Presumably the questioner meant, why does Prof. Johnson defend white males who are accused of sexual assault, as if white males are undeserving of due process merely by virtue of their birth class.

And that's really why this blog, and every similar effort, faces an uphill struggle.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

I don't know what a rapist "looks like," but I do know that George Lawlor, a politics and sociology student at Warwick University, is an affront to the sexual grievance industry and that he needs to be stopped by any means.

You see, George Lawlor has the audacity to insist he knows what "consent" means--the impudent young man probably took it upon himself to look it up in the dictionary (on whose authority, George?!) and discover that there's no secret meaning behind it, that consent really does mean consent.

So now this presumptuous young man, this George Lawlor, is insisting he doesn't need invaluable consent training.

This monster--there's no other word for this George Lawlor--is impeding the invaluable work of the rape cottage industry, work that is a hallmark of our institutions of higher learning. Does this George Lawlor not know that consent training is a growth industry critical to the economy? Tell me, George, just how are useless people supposed to stay employed if people like you won't allow them to do their useless things?!

The next thing you know, college students will be insisting they don't need training on how not to steal, commit battery, or murder. It's the Weimar Republic all over!

George Lawlor even had the temerity to provide a rationale for his position:

I feel as if I’m taking the “wrong” side here, but someone has to say it – I don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist. That much comes naturally to me, as I am sure it does to the overwhelming majority of people you and I know. Brand me a bigot, a misogynist, a rape apologist, I don’t care. I stand by that.

I already know what is and what isn’t consent. I also know about those more nuanced situations where consent isn’t immediately obvious as any decent, empathetic human being does. Yes means yes, no means no. It’s really that simple. You’d think Russell Group university students would get that much, but apparently the consent teachers don’t have as high a regard for their peers as I do.

I’m not denying there have been tragic cases of rape and abuse on campuses in the past, but do you really think the kind of people who lacks empathy, respect and human decency to the point where they’d violate someone’s body is really going to turn up to a consent lesson on a university campus? They won’t. The only people who’ll turn up will be people who (surprise, surprise) already know when it’s okay to shag someone. No new information will be taught or learned. It will just be an echo chamber of people pointing out the obvious and others nodding along, thinking the whole time thinking that they’ve saved the world.

Okay, I get it--this George Lawlor is using logic and persuasion to make his case, is he? Well, I have news for George Lawlor. That just proves he's a misogynist, a rape apologist, a rape denier, and a cretinous miscreation who is not suited to mingle in polite society with women.

Jessica Jin, a 24-year-old recent graduate of the University of Texas, has started #CocksnotGlocks, a protest against a new Texas law that allows guns on college campuses. In contrast to the new law, Texas law and University of Texas policy forbid the prominent display of big wagging dildos, and Jin thinks our culture's priorities are screwed up. Because of Jin, thousands of UT students have pledged to carry dildos around campus on August 24, 2016, the day the new campus-carry law goes into effect.

Jin claims there has also been an outpouring of hate and anger directed at her, mostly from men who (1) feel threatened and angered by toy penises, and (2) are passionate about gun rights.

The notion that men are threatened by college students walking around campus displaying dildos is absurd. Any backlash to #CocksnotGlocks emanates from gun rights advocates--Jin has put herself smack in the middle of one of the most heated controversies in America (an issue we're not going to deal with head-on in this post)--but she wants to make it about men being threatened by toy penises.

Some of Jin's statements are illuminating. She says that "a lot of the anger has to do with the threat dildos pose to masculinity in some people’s minds." They "see the word ‘dildo’ and their eyes just glaze over and they start foaming at the mouth.” Further, "people want me dead for a dildo."

Why did Jin use dildos as the centerpiece of her protest? These are Jin's words: ". . . it spotlights the masturbatory nature of the power which people derive from gun ownership, and the self aggrandizing 'I'm one of the good ones, I'll protect you' arguments we're so often expected to simply trust." (And, no, I'm not making that up.) Further: ". . . this satirical employment of dildos has also sparked more serious conversations on topics like . . . the intersection of guns and sexuality, and even campus sexual assault." (No, I didn't make that up.) And: "The narratives surrounding sexuality (or just dildos, in this case) and guns are more intertwined than one would expect, and more similarities seem to unfold every minute. They each have the power to instantly masculate or emasculate at a moment's notice. Some shootings in this past year can even be traced straight back to sexual repression. Dildos and guns are in it together for the long haul."

Allow me go and bang my head against the wall.

Jin is part of the usual crowd anxious to pin everything bad about our culture on their made-up version of traditional masculinity--meaning, misogynistic, racist, violent, conservative men who love guns. The problem, of course, is that the puerile straw man Jin has constructed has little to no basis in reality.

First, I must chuckle because it isn't the "men" Jin describes who'd be offended by the sight of fake penises on campus, it's feminists. The stereotypical "men" Jin describes seem to be the type who'd have fake testicles hanging from the backs of their pick-ups--the last group who'd be bent out of shape over college students with dildos.

Ask yourself this: if, separate and apart from Jin's protest, UT fraternity men decided to walk around campus one day wielding dildos, who would be offended--the "men" Jin describes or folks like Jin? We all know the answer, and we all know what would happen--the fraternities would be suspended and the ringleaders punished.

When some members of the Harvard crew team famously decided to build a 9-foot-6-inch tall snow phallus as a prank, "women’s groups . . . led a chorus of complaints against the snow penis, arguing that such a display is demeaning to women." Women tore it down, and one of them, feminist Amy E. Keel, analogized the snow phallus to rape: "No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent," she declared. "The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat." The snow sculpture's "only purpose [was] to assert male dominance," and it "propagated the notion that women don’t really belong here. It . . . put us in our place.” Women’s Studies Lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld wrote that the public space where the ice sculpture was erected "should be free from menacing reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability.” She explained that the snow penis follows a long line of public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles. “Women do not need to be reminded of the power of the symbol of the male genitalia,” Rosenfeld declared.

Brooklyn College once bowed to pressure to change its logo because the old logo, a silhouette of an iconic campus clock tower, after a women's studies professor said it looked too much like a penis. Tufts' men's crew team was suspended from racing due to a double-entendre T-shirt the crew created that stated "check out our cox" above a picture of a silhouetted boat. ("Cox" is short for "coxswain," the person who sits in the front of a boat and directs the rowers.) Apparently, the shirt was reported through Tufts' "bias incident" reporting system, in which students can anonymously report actions, words, or pictures that "target a person or community." The dean allegedly said the picture was too phallic and promoted aggression and rape.

Sorry, Jin, but any "anger" being heaped on your protest has nothing to do with fake penises and everything to do with guns.

Second, while we're on the subject, gun violence is, indeed, a serious problem in America, but it is one shaped by race, something people like Jin studiously avoid discussing. See here. If we want to address the social pathology of gun violence, we need to look to our government's policies that decimated the inner city family, starting with the infamous "man-out-of-the-house" rule of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program that rewarded women if the father was not living with the family. Gun violence is, indeed, a serious problem for the kind of "men" Jin describes--because of suicide, a national epidemic that strikes men far more often than women (and, perhaps because of that gender disparity, is largely ignored).

It is also absurd, and disingenuous, to conflate a tiny segment of the population that suffers from serious mental health issues and goes on rampage killings with traditional masculinity, but the usual suspects do it all the time.

You want to protest guns, great--the First Amendment gives you that right, and every right thinking person knows that gun violence is a terrible problem in this country. But don't go tearing down your opposition by turning them into knuckle dragging cretins who froth at the mouth at the thought of college women carrying dildos. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Another progressive media outlet--this time, Mother Jones--wants us to believe that college students are reporting to their schools that they've been raped in epic numbers but the schools are only revealing a tiny portion of the reports.

Mother Jones says that "a survey released last month by the Association of American Universities (AAU) has revealed [that colleges and universities are] undercounting the number of rape reports that schools actually receive." For example, at the University of Florida last year, there were 7 Clery Act official rape reports but the AAU survey reveals that there were actually 214 reported rapes.

Wow! That's a massive discrepancy--7 versus 214. The University of Florida must have hired the Nixon White House to pull off that cover-up. And a lot of other schools are doing the same thing, according to the AAU survey.

Except when you read further in the Mother Jones article, you find that's not really what's happening. For a big percentage of the supposed rape "reports," women didn't really report that they were raped--they merely "talked to a counselor."

There's a hell of a big difference between reporting a rape to authorities and talking to a counselor--for the latter, we have no idea what was discussed, and many such meetings likely occur because the woman just wants to air conflicted feelings about an unsatisfactory sexual encounter. But in the loopy world of the sexual grievance industry and its media enablers, it's fair game to conflate the two to "prove" a college rape epidemic, with all its attendant panic and influx of resources.

Monday, October 12, 2015

I will offer one addition: is the school public or private? If private, you will need to consult the handbook very carefully because it will probably contain the entire panoply of rights in the event you are ever wrongly accused of sexual assault.

Whether private or public, does the handbook specifically promise students rights in connection with the conduct of the hearing? The more specific, the more likely the handbook will be construed to create contractual rights that can be enforced in the event of a dispute.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Salon insists that traditional masculinity is behind the Oregon shooting:

Guns, sex, and money serve as a sort of holy trinity for traditional masculinity, the tropes by which a supposedly true man is known. When it’s stripped down to its toxic core, "what is a man" ends up being defined by how many chicks he can bang, how much ass he can kick, and how much money and “status” he has.

At its core, masculinity is evil, don't you know, and needs to be reconstructed. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Don't read it--it's the same steaming pile of bullshit that pops up in pretty much every progressive rag after pretty muchevery tragedy where a deranged young man goes on a rampage and kills innocent people.

The problem with every one of these rants, of course, is that they conflate a tiny segment of the population that suffers from serious mental health issues with the vast majority of young men who bear no relation to the outliers.

In any event, if the writers of pieces like this had reduced virtually any other group of Americans to vile caricature, they'd be fired on the spot, but it's perfectly PC to beat young men in print like piñatas. What's humorous is that these H.L. Menken-wannabes smugly do to young men the same thing they vehemently mock when, say, a conservative politician conflates Muslims as a group with Muslim terrorists, or Mexican immigrants as a group with criminals.

The inanity of the piece is self-evident and requires neither serious nor extended refutation. There is a streak of misandry a mile-wide in the progressive media--the people who write for these sites really do think there's something wrong with your son just because he isn't your daughter.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

This is among the most important posts we've written and, although it will be a difficult post for some to read, no "trigger warnings" here--everyone needs to read this, and we need to act on it.

People who claim to have been victimized by sexual assault are afforded all manner of assistance to deal with their trauma. Tremendous resources are devoted for their mental well-being.

In contrast, people who are wrongly accused are left to fend for themselves, despite the fact that a false or wrongful rape claim is among the most traumatic and life-altering events that can happen to anyone. The insensitivity shown to men and boys wrongly accused of sexual assault is unconscionable.

Jay Cheshire, 17--a kind, funny, talented, hard-working, bright but vulnerable and sensitive young man--was accused of rape this past spring. The alleged female victim dropped the allegation and the police investigation was ended. On July 3, Jay was found hanging in a park in Southampton. He died two days later. At an inquest, it was learned that Jay struggled to cope with the false accusations and was "absolutely distraught." The police dropped the charges but didn't bother to make sure Jay was alright. Jay wasn't alright. See here and here.

The cases are legion where men and boys wrongly accused of rape have not been able to cope with the ordeal and instead made a tragic, irreversible decision.

A 23-year-old mentally unstable man was very upset and angry that he was accused of sexual assault. The police investigated the claim and interviewed the young man. On June, 4, 2009, police decided to drop the charges. They immediately informed the accuser didn't tell the young man before the young man hanged himself. Under applicable law, "victims" (that is a code word for "accusers") have the right to be told when a case is dropped but there is no such law for informing suspects, even the falsely accused. At a jury inquest, the delay in informing the young man of the decision to drop the case was called a "contributing factor" in his death.

A 27-year-old man was subjected to seven months of "hell" before a jury took just 45 minutes to clear him of a rape charge. Thereafter, the judge did something stunning. He revealed in open court that the Crown Prosecution service was guilty of “a craven abdication of responsibility” in bringing the case against the man. The judge explained to the jurors that the accuser had previously falsely accused another young man of rape. Some jurors broke down in tears when they heard that the 21-year-old woman not only had wrongly accused someone else, but that the wrongful accusation played a role in the suicide of her 21-year-old male victim.

We won't even begin to discuss the cases where men and boys wrongly accused of rape contemplated suicide--that list is practically endless. Former television star John Leslie contemplated suicide after being accused of a rape claim that was subsequently cleared. A 25-year-old falsely accused father of two lost his job due to the rape lie and eventually grew so frustrated by the lie that he tried to throw himself into the path of oncoming traffic. Concerned passers-by pulled him out of the road to safety. Thereafter, his false accuser was sentenced to a twenty month prison sentence. Still, months after the charges were dropped, people were still saying "have you heard, we've got a rapist living down the road."

We need to be like those concerned passers-by who pulled the young father to safety--we need to do something to save men and boys from making a tragic, irreversible decision. Suicide is a national epidemic. Suicide among males is four times higher than among females. Male deaths represent 79% of all US suicides. It is the second leading cause of death for 15-24-year-olds.

Men wrongly accused of sex offenses are usually devastated by the ordeal and are in need of special assistance, yet their needs are ignored. The police may not even bother to tell the accused if the case was closed, and any concern shown will be for the accuser, not the accused. A University of Iowa oboe professor apparently committed suicide after being accused of sexual harassment (the validity of the allegations is not known). Even before a single scrap of evidence was admitted at trial over the alleged harassment, the director of the school's Rape-Victim Advocacy Program said that such apparent suicides could emotionally affect the "victim" who reports harassment. Even in that tragic instance, the emphasis is all about the accuser; the men accused aren't given a thought.

We have received notes from young men telling us that our blog was instrumental in their decisions not to take their own lives. This blog is a very poor substitute for the help young men wrongly accused of rape need, but it underscores the absence of badly needed resources for the wrongly accused. Men wrongly accused of rape face the prospect of years behind prison bars with all its attendant horrors and the loss of jobs and social relationships. They are usually pariahs, sometimes even after they're cleared. (A cringe-worthy example of this: three men falsely accused of rape in the infamous Hofstra false rape case appeared on the Steve Wilkos show after the accuser admitted under oath it didn't happen. They were immediately booed by some members of the audience.)

I plead with anyone in this situation who happens to find this blog post at the worst possible moment of his life: justice usually prevails, all is not lost, and you need to fight. I implore you: don't make an irreversible decision over what is usually just a temporary problem. Many, many other men have been in your situation. If you find yourself thinking of ending your life, DON'T DO IT. Seek help, immediately. Go here to start: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org or call 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

A recent Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows that 44% of college women--that's approaching half--think that when a woman gives a guy a "nod in agreement," that isn't enough for consent. A bare majority of college women (just 51%) think that it is. Here is the actual question:

. . . .

The fact that a staggering percentage of college women don't understand that an unmistakable outward manifestation of assent constitutes consent should have raised eyebrows all across America. It should have caused us to question the findings in that and other surveys that suggest there is a "rape epidemic" on college campuses. But, of course that didn't happen because the truth doesn't advance the preferred narrative--that innocent young women are routinely raped by "normal" young mena la "Jackie" in Rolling Stone's rape fairy tale (you remember--"Jackie" supposedly was pushed to the ground and forced to lie on shards of glass while seven vicious young men raped her, and vast segments of the public believed it).

Do I mean to say that an accusation is not tantamount to an actual rape? Heresy, you say? The leader of the college sexual grievance industry candidly admitted he sees "case-after-case" where "sincere victims [sic] . . . believe something has happened to them" even though "overwhelming proof" shows it did not. Read it again: "case-after-case."

These aren't the views of loony outliers, these are mainstream feminists. In virtually any other context, comments this outlandish would draw waves of laughter, but here, they give out PhDs to the women most proficient at spewing the lunacy.

If this sounds harsh, it needs to be. The problem is that the lunacy is being given statutory articulation, and the hostility to due process for college men is being codified in laws across America. And middle America doesn't have a clue it's happening.

So what the hell is wrong with today's college women? The real blame lies with the women who are teaching them to view themselves as victims, and to hate--how else can their views be characterized?--yes, hate, men.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Ashe Schow is the leading voice in America for wrongly accused college men. Day in and day out, she highlights the college rape witch hunt that has ensnared so many innocent young men.

Today, she's written a wonderful, and wonderfully succinct, article that blows to bits the made-up college rape epidemic. You need to read it here right now. Ashe makes this brilliant point: "I think the funniest thing in all of this is how the claim that 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault in college was enough for massive calls for draconian legislation to fix an 'epidemic.' But reports that 1 in 5 accusations are false are being ignored as a trivial matter."

Yes, my friends, if our moral superiors who dominate the public discourse on sexual assault (the sexual grievance industry) cared one whit about being honest and consistent, they would have to concede that there is a false rape epidemic and a "false rape culture" on college campuses. Yet the purveyors of PC bullshit steadfastly ignore the injustices to college men precisely because they don't affect college women. Let's cut the bullshit and just say it.

Monday, October 5, 2015

At Harvard, more than 18 percent of rape claims were false or baseless last year--at least. That's only the percentage that campus police have definitively determined were "false or baseless"--that's how the report itself defines "unfounded." Of the remaining rape claims, it is certain that a sizable percentage can't be classified one way or the other (that's true of every population of rape claims), and it is safe to assume that a significant percentage of those are also false or baseless. It would not be surprising if the total number of false or baseless rape claims approximated Prof. Kanin's much reviled 40 or 50 percent.

Shocked? Feminist Brett Sokolow, the leader of the campus sexual grievance industry who has done more to shape colleges' sexual misconduct policies than anyone in America, last year wrote that he sees "case-after-case" where "sincere victims [sic] . . . believe something has happened to them" even though "overwhelming proof" shows it did not. Mr. Sokolow suggested mental health issues may play an important factor in these false accusations.

Last year, no other criminal offense at Harvard had any "false or baseless" claims. What does that mean? Perhaps nothing, but it may also suggest that rape is unique among criminal claims that women either lie about or are wrong about. (It is easy to see how a lot of women might get it wrong: a new Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation survey reveals that almost half of all college women think that when a woman gives a guy a "nod in agreement," that isn't enough for consent. At least we know where the vast fortunes spent on the "war on rape" are going: to teach our daughters to mistake consent for rape.) Whether the accuser was lying or just mistaken--and it doesn't much matter to the wrongly accused--these alarming statistics underscore the necessity of greater due process protections for presumptively innocent college men accused of rape, per the counsel of 28 Harvard law professors who last year sounded this warning bell in words more adamant than even this blog could muster: "Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation."

More appropriately, rape and related claims of serious sex offenses ought to be left to law enforcement, per the wishes of 90 percent of likely American voters. As unjust as the criminal justice system can be for young men accused of rape (e.g., see here), the due process protections afforded persons accused of crimes promise fairer outcomes than college kangaroo courts are able to provide in the vast majority of cases, and the criminal justice system is subject to much greater accountability. It is astounding that fraternities--whose houses are unjustly caricatured as rape pits--are leading the charge to insist that rape claims be reported to the police.

One additional critical point needs to be made. The scare surveys that show one-in-five college women are sexually assaulted are rightfully attacked as politically biased and fatally flawed. But there's a problem with such surveys that is so fundamental it ought to be mentioned at the top of any such discussion: every allegation that meets the surveys' criteria of sexual assault is uncritically accepted as true and none are tested against competing claims of innocence. Harvard is an example of what happens when claims are actually investigated.

It's time to end the sexual grievance industry's witch hunt on college men.